The Spectral Wilderness

Author: Oliver Baez Bendorf Publisher: The Kent State University Press (2015) "Bendorf's poems give us all we have ever wanted, to wake up and feel that the body we are in is ours, that the hands on the ends of our wrists—our body's gates of tenderness—are large enough to hold in them all the things we have desired. . . . In poem after poem he builds and rebuilds a body, a story, a desire that are at once familiar and strange, capable of brightness like any headlight but also capable of losing that light in their brokenness which makes us love them even more." –Natalie Diaz  "This debut collection from award-winning poet Oliver Baez Bendorf is 'alive in the fluid instability of any category,' Mark Doty writes in the introduction to this stunningly lyrical book that invites the reader to travel with Bendorf through a landscape of becoming, from the countryside to a bodega to a barber shop and back into the wild.'It's a joy . . . to come nearer to a realm of experience little explored in